Archive for the ‘John McCain’ Category

Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska, ended her inscrutable cat-and-mouse game with the political establishment on Wednesday by saying that she would not join the field of Republican candidates seeking her party’s nomination, but would still work to oust President Obama.

Any Republican or conservative or Tea Party supporter who dumps on Palin in any way over the Tucson shooting or her defense of herself should just stop talking now.

It does not matter whether you support Palin for President, whether you think she is electable, or even whether you like her. This is not about Palin, it is about the mainstream media’s desire to have Barack Obama re-elected at any cost and to take down any Republican candidate who stands in the way.

I’ll take it one step further, and agree with John Ziegler (h/t HotAir) that there may not be any Republican candidate other than Palin who can withstand the reinvigorated Obama media juggernaut:

Everyone else will inevitably melt (like even grizzled veteran John McCain did) when they get close to the blast furnace that will be going up against the Obama juggernaut. Far more than anyone else in conservative history, Palin has been forced to prove just how fireproof her convictions are and how deep her resolve is.

In the vile attempt to tie Palin to the Tucson shooting we have witnessed the test run for how the left-wing blogosphere will target Republican candidates and propel false narratives into the mainstream media, and how the mainstream media will take those narratives and run with them.

If Palin is taken down politically over the Tucson shooting, there is not a single Republican candidate who can survive the coming onslaught.

But Palin represents more that superficial antitheses. Most polls, and the November election, suggest that the public has had it with deficits, big government, more stimulus and takeovers, and ObamaCare, whether delivered by Democrats or Republicans.

The problem with such an unfocused Tea Party anger is said to be the lack of leadership, which to many is itself somewhat at odds with the grassroots, prairie-fire imprimatur of the movement. But for now, Palin, almost alone, has the star power, the ability to draw enormous crowds, garner attention, raise controversy, to be emblematic of that “don’t tread on me” unease — largely in her mysterious ability to connect with millions in the middle class.

Her liability is that as a mother of five, happily married, and former city-council member, small town mayor, Alaskan regulator, and governor, she has not had a lot of internships at The New Republic, or Gore-like graduate experiences, or tenure among the writers and thinkers in New York. To these few she seems as grotesque as she appears authentic to millions. And to be fair, in Obama-like fashion, she has not had the financial experience of a Romney, the executive experience of a Daniels, or the legislative experience of a Gingrich.

But could she ever win a presidency? The conventional wisdom is no. I say conventional wisdom in the sense of sober and judicious conservative thinkers who raise eyebrows at her exuberance and suspect in an hour meeting they could stump her, in Couric-like fashion, on everything from Balkan fault lines to the work of Edmund Burke.

Someone like a President Palin could really blow it with a hickish bow to a Saudi Arabian autocrat or a rambling apology about American sins in Turkey of all places, or nominate some nut who would have a Truther past or resort to racism or a yokel who would brag about her hero Mao.

But more germanely, Palin need not run for the presidency in 2012 in the manner commentator and newly elected governor Reagan did not until 1968, and did not successfully until 1980 — all the while establishing a populist conservative persona as hated — and successful — during his near two-decade pre-presidential career as a younger Palin might be in the two decades ahead.

Palin is scary not so much in 2012, but that she could be around — and be around in an evolving way — for a long time to come.

WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): AP: Over 1 million Americans seen losing homes in 2011. “The bleakest year in the foreclosure crisis has only just begun. . . . Lenders are poised to take back more homes this year than any other since the U.S. housing meltdown began in 2006. About 5 million borrowers are at least two months behind on their mortgages and industry experts say more people will miss payments because of job losses and also loans that exceed the value of the homes they are living in.”

I get that it’s a sort of “turnabout is fair play” from the set that must be very annoyed by now at all the prompter jokes. But it misses the point of why the prompter jokes have caught on. A prompter feeds your remarks to you word for word. The idea that you would need such a device to talk to a room full of sixth graders or a meeting of your own staff is funny.

On another level, the prompter jokes took off because they reinforce the substantive argument that Obama is in over his head, because they indicate that he can’t perform the the presidency’s basic public-speaking duties without a major safety net. I’m not sure what substantive argument Palin’s hand-notes are supposed to underline, and I suspect it’s not an argument so much as an attitude. The attitude would be that writing on your hand is dumb and low-class. On the left, where this opinion of Palin already prevails, anything which reinforces it will be picked up and cheerfully passed around. And, to the extent that anyone not on the left notices this giddy snobbery, it will play to Palin’s strengths.

For example, one might say: “Unlike the guy who needs a three thousand dollar teleprompter to get out of bed in the morning, Palin speaks from concise notes like everybody else. And, like other busy moms, she sometimes writes notes on her hand.” The comeback is so obvious that, again, I really can’t figure out why Palin’s detractors are bringing this up at all.

By the way, Palin delivered a 45-minute speech. Those seven words were her “notes”.

She’s not even an elected official now.

The Commander in Chief of the United States has a teleprompter for every word and can’t even pronounce “corpsman” correctly.

Franken was presiding over the Senate Thursday afternoon as Lieberman spoke about amendments he planned to offer to the bill. Lieberman asked for an additional moment to finish — a routine request — but Franken refused to grant the time.

“In my capacity as the senator from Minnesota, I object,” Franken said.

I used to read Andrew Sullivan until I decided that he had irretrievably gone off the deep end, and that was before he took up his gynecological research crusade on Sarah Palin. However, there are several blogs I read who are posting on this masterpiece of obsession and hysteria:

There is no proof here of anything, but there is a much more nuanced and detailed narrative of the events (especially now we have Palin’s first considered version of the events since the campaign) that when taken together has definitely helped illuminate what was once obscure and, well, bizarre.

In the Freudian sense, hysteria is a disease of “of the female sexual and reproductive organs.” In Sullivan’s case, the organs are on someone else, but it’s hysteria all the same. That the organs are on someone else may also explain why Sullivan insists that Trig is Bristol Palin’s birth child – no matter that Bristol delivered a full-term baby eight months after Trig’s birth.

Sullivan says he’s hit a lacuna, and Jules Crittenden looks into it with the dignity and reserve it calls for,

For anyone who’s wondering, a “lacuna” is a gap in a manuscript or, anatomically, in tissue such as bone. I know it sounds like a place in Maui where you relax with tropical drinks, but it isn’t. In Sullivan’s case, the lacuna would appear to specifically refer to his latest gap in rationality, though that’s probably better described as more of a sharp dip in a cavernous trough.

It was like watching two lightly muzzled Doberman Pinschers, behaving because they have to, but with an undergrowl that translates, roughly, into “if we’re ever alone together in the yard, you’re going down…”

Having denied -as well she should – a claim by a blog and a newspaper that she’s divorcing her husband, Jonathan Martin at Politico says it’s all her fault anyway:Sarah Palin beats press to blog claim

By having her spokeswoman repeat the charges to rebut them in a public form, Palin effectively guaranteed coverage from the mainstream media that otherwise would not report claims attributed to unnamed sources on an anonymous blog.

But that’s nonsense. Mainstream media sources — including Politico and including Martin (remember the way premature “John Edwards is quitting to be with his sick wife” rumors?) — report rumor and rely on anonymous sources all the time. The fact that people are talking about something is often in and of itself newsworthy. Especially when it’s about Sarah Palin.

If the Palin squad had not taken action, the news tonight would be the frenzy of reporters besieging the Palin camp to get a denial of a shocking claim. Boy, I’d bet they’d just love to get a no comment to that one. Or, the story would read, Palin denies disturbing reports sourced to Alaskan blog.